Innovation can happen by chance, without a determined effort or specific methodology. But when it does, it's more like luck than strategic progress. While there is a role for serendipity in strategy – being able to take advantage of pleasant surprises -- too often, that's the only way companies approach innovation: with fingers crossed. The same organizations that diligently recruit to fill their ranks with clever and creative people often fail to put in place a process that seeks to get the best out of those people.

Over the last decade, the Internet has had a profound impact on business. It has spawned a slew of new business models and has helped make operating models vastly more efficient. By contrast, the Web’s impact on management models has been relatively modest.

We're at the end of an eight-year period, which  was marked in the beginning by the demise of Enron and marked at the end by the demise of Lehman Brothers.  During that near decade,  the quasi-religious mantra of business was shareholder value: Focus on performance and on performance alone. That's what real managers did.  They decomposed activity to work out the value creation potential and they focused on performance. Everything else was stuff that needed to be done to run the machine.

Elad Gil, head of Geo at Twitter, has a great new post on Tech Crunch, "The 5 Myths of Building A Great Mobile Team."  Gil, who has experience building teams at Google and a handful of startups, hammers on the need to hire great engineers who can be flexible as their tasks change. That tagline for his first principle is, "Hire great athletes; mobile 'experts' will be useless in 6 months."

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

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